Waking Up to Success

Last time, we talked about your values. Our next three activities are going to focus on your vision for the future.

Over the next three blog posts, we’re going to look at success from three angles:

How do you want to be feeling?

What commitments do you want to have?

What do you want your schedule to look like?

Each of these activities is quite short, and together, they’ll help you develop a stronger vision of success. Without overloading yourself in details, you’ll discover if you’re off course and have the opportunity to correct the trajectory.

For long-term success, we need to really understand what we're shooting for. Fleeting desires and superficial goals are too-often inconsistent and incompatible with our deeper yearnings.​How do you want to be feeling?​Write a list of feelings that come to mind when you think about this question. This may overlap with your values activity a little bit, but it may not.

Try to think specifically about the state of mind (or state of being) that you want to be feeling – calm, happy, or invigorated, for example. Write down as many words as you can think of in 60 seconds.

Now, see if you can prioritize your list and get your top three desired feelings, in order.

Once you’ve got your top three, try to get clear on what you mean by those feelings. What will you see and hear? What will be true? In other words, how will you know you’re feeling the feeling you want? (You’re noticing this sounds a lot like the values activity, right? It’s based on the same idea: Get really clear on what matters most and the path will become more obvious…)

Here’s an example from when I did this activity. My 60-second list, my narrowing-down to my top 3, and my brief thoughts that clarify what I mean by the feelings I chose. Give it a try!

Figure 1. Joel's actual handwritten list of desired feelings.

Done? Great job!

Next time, we’ll look at your commitments (and share the secret about why it’s so hard to say no).